After Shots, Pistorius Kept Quiet, Guard Says

Pieter Baba with an interpreter during the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria, South Africa, on Friday.

Pool photo by Theana Breugem

By ALAN COWELL

March 7, 2014

A security guard testified on Friday that Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee track star, insisted that “everything is fine” just minutes after the shots that killed the girlfriend he is accused of murdering in the early hours of Feb. 14, 2013.

The testimony came on the fifth day of Mr. Pistorius’s trial, much of which has been televised. The case has seized attention around the world and, in South Africa, has been taken by some as signaling a throwback to a reflexive recourse to violence bred in the apartheid era.

As the first week of the trial drew to a close on Friday, the prosecution seemed intent on pursuing one of its central themes: that in contrast to Mr. Pistorius’s gutsy and gilded image as the sprinter who used the sickle-shaped, carbon-fiber prosthetic legs that earned him the nickname Blade Runner to compete against able-bodied athletes, there was a darker side to his personality related to guns.

Reeva Steenkamp, a 29-year-old model, law school graduate and budding reality-television star, was shot to death through a locked bathroom door at Mr. Pistorius’s villa in a gated complex in Pretoria.

He has described the episode as a tragic accident, saying he mistook her for an intruder. The state has charged him with premeditated murder, which carries a minimum 25-year prison term on conviction.

In a newspaper article this week, the crime writer Margie Orford asked whether the notion of an intruder in crime-ridden South Africa was a reference to “the figure of the threatening black stranger,” which she said was “perhaps the most atavistic of white South African fears” molded by the specter of “swart gevaar,” or “black peril,” that underpinned apartheid.

Oscar Pistorius is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

Theana Breugem / MEDIA24, via Associated Press

“So many men in South Africa,” she added in the article, “exist in this state of macho hair-trigger tension in which action comes, all too often, before thought.”

At the trial on Friday, the security guard, Pieter Baba, who had been working at the complex, said Mr. Pistorius called him at 3:21 a.m., about five minutes after the shooting, but was too upset to speak. When Mr. Baba called him back a few minutes later, Mr. Pistorius said, “Security, everything is fine,” the guard said.

Throughout the week of hearings, prosecution witnesses have spoken of the sounds of a woman’s screams and shooting coming from the Pistorius home. The defense has questioned the testimony, saying the screams could have been those of an anguished Mr. Pistorius.

The prosecution has also sought to depict Mr. Pistorius as a quick-tempered man with a passion for guns and a history of mishandling them. In addition to the charge of premeditated murder, he is also accused of three firearms offenses.

On Friday, a former girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, whose relationship with Mr. Pistorius ended when he started dating Ms. Steenkamp in late 2012, said the athlete fired a round from a car’s open sunroof minutes after a police officer pulled him over for speeding and saw a loaded handgun on a car seat.

The officer emptied the gun’s magazine onto the floor of the car, she said.

“Oscar was very angry,” said Ms. Taylor, who said she observed the episode from a rear seat. Two minutes after the encounter with the police officer, “I saw Oscar take his gun and shoot out of the car roof,” she said. “A very loud sound.”

Another passenger in the car was Darren Fresco, a friend of Mr. Pistorius’s, who had been present at a separate incident when the athlete accidentally fired a round under a table in a busy Johannesburg restaurant and asked Mr. Fresco to take the blame, according to previous testimony at the trial. On two other occasions, Ms. Taylor said, she saw Mr. Pistorius draw a gun.

Contrary to suggestions by the defense team, Ms. Taylor said, Mr. Pistorius’s screams did not sound like those of a woman. “He sounds like a man,” she said.